The surname Macri will once again govern the city of Buenos Aires. Jorge Macri, cousin of former president Mauricio Macri, will be the next head of government of the Argentine capital. Former mayor of a wealthy municipality in the urban cordon that surrounds the city, Macri has become this Tuesday the latest heir to a 15-year hegemony that his cousin inaugurated when he won the mayor of Buenos Aires for the first time in 2007. While his alliance national, Together for Change, suffers after being left out of the second presidential round, Macrismo retains power in its place of origin.
The mayoralty of the city of Buenos Aires had been left up in the air after Sunday’s elections. Jorge Macri had obtained 49.6% of the votes, four tenths away from winning in the first round. The second round should have been fought against the Peronist candidate, Leandro Santoro, who obtained 32.20%. Santoro decided this Tuesday to get out of the race to “concentrate efforts” on the presidential campaign that will pit his party against the ultra Javier Milei.
“A realistic reading of the electoral result, added to the explicit support of Javier Milei for Jorge Macri, gives us the guideline that it would be foolish to force a ballotage“, announced Santoro in a statement. “We consider that the correct strategy that this historical moment demands of us is to concentrate our efforts on defending democracy against the authoritarian threat, contributing to Sergio Massa winning in the City of Buenos Aires and being elected President of the Nation.”
Peronism has prioritized the presidential campaign. Santoro had little chance of turning around an election in which his rival was 17 points ahead, more than 300,000 votes, and needed only 6,000 more to win the mayor’s office. Macri had somewhere to harvest them: 14% of the city voted for the far-right candidate, Ramiro Marra, who came in third place. Marra has remained silent since the elections, but his political boss, Javier Milei, was tempted to support Macri in a second round, congratulating him on Sunday’s results.
The second round in the city was to be held on the same day as the presidential second round, and Peronism interpreted that a campaign in which the extreme right joined forces with the traditional right would harm its race for the presidency. “Santoro’s decision is very brave and sensible,” celebrated the Peronist candidate, Sergio Massa, who won with 36.6% last Sunday and will define the position against Milei (29.9%) on November 19 .
Jorge Macri has just received a huge inheritance. Not only will he be head of government in the largest city in the country, he will also become the leader of his party with the greatest visibility on the national map. After the electoral year, the Alliance of Together for Change will govern the capital and 10 of the 23 provinces, but only two of them with candidates from the Republican Proposal, the PRO, Mauricio Macri’s party: Chubut, in the south, and Entre Ríos, on the border with Uruguay. The power map of Together for Change is changing after the electoral failure. Patricia Bullrich, the hard-line conservative who retained the candidacy after the primaries, came in third place with 23.8% of the votes and left the parties that make up her alliance privately discussing whether they will support the extreme right or the Peronism in the presidential elections.
Bullrich had displaced the moderate Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, current mayor of Buenos Aires, who had been Mauricio Macri’s dolphin when he left the city for the presidency in 2015. Macri did not let him choose his own successor and imposed his cousin on him. The controversy escalated beyond nepotism. Jorge Macri, mayor on leave of Vicente López, a wealthy municipality in the province of Buenos Aires, did not meet an elementary requirement to govern the city: living in it. The city Constitution requires that candidates live there for at least five years “prior to the date of the election.” Jorge Macri was authorized because a court took as good the years that he lived in Buenos Aires during his youth.
“I want to thank again all those who trusted us, I assume the commitment that means,” Jorge Macri wrote on his social networks after learning of his opponent’s resignation. “Four years of work and changes await us. “We are ready to start a new era together.”
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